HE ART RENEWAL CENTER is proud to present the award winners and the top 100 finalists in our third International ARC Salontm Competition. This year we continued our pattern of growth with over 1600 entries, and a significant increase in the number of participants as well.

ARC is encouraged by the quality of work submitted in this year's competition. Young gifted artists who are just now beginning their careers and some of the most legendary and well-respected artists alive today were brought together in a single competition where the prestige of even making it to the Finals now carries significant weight with galleries, collectors and peers.

This year's Best in Show with an honorarium of $10,000 has been awarded to Dean Mitchell of The United States for his painting of an elderly woman, Rowena. With an honorarium of $3,000, "The William Bouguereau Award - Emotion Theme and the Figure" goes to Evan Wilson of The United States for his beautiful painting of a woman and a baby in a bed, entitled Anita and Elliot. Together with 3 Awards in each of the 5 Categories, plus the addition of 2 Chairman's Choice Awards and 5 ARC Staff Awards, the allotted prize amount in this year's ARC Salontm has totaled more than $44,000.

If you are interested in submitting work for the 2007 ARC Salontm, keep an eye on the ARC website for upcoming announcements.
From all across the world the very best of the best artists are now here for your viewing pleasure. We invite you to celebrate with us in honoring all of our Finalists and Award Winners for the incredibly high quality and timeless beauty found within this exhibit. On behalf of our Chairman, Fred Ross and everyone here at the Art Renewal Center a well-deserved congratulations is extended to all of our Award winners and participants. We thank them for their dedication to the upholding of artistic traditions and values sought by ARC and wish them continued success in all their artistic endeavors.

Purchase Award
Cody SwansonEve
Clay
66 x 30 inches

Purchase Awards

ARC endeavored to purchase over $150,000 worth of award winning works in this year's ARC Salon, but to our disappointment, we were also pleasantly surprised to discover that each of the works had already been sold. Surely this is an indication of the growing success of the finest living artists of our time.
In 2004 virtually every work that we chose, we were able to purchase. Last year, only half of the works picked for purchase were available.
This year, every item chosen for that honor had already been snatched up by collectors.

This year we decided to add to the benefits of winning an ARC Scholarship, free entry into this year's ARC Salon, and the winner, Cody Swanson's Eve has also won this year's purchase award.

Message from the ARC Chairman

his year the ARC Salontm has continued to rapidly grow in popularity. More artists are submitting works and on average each participant is entering more examples of their work.

This clearly is another positive sign of the ongoing shift in the way artists want to be trained and in the kinds of work they are interested in producing...works which express our shared humanity and communicate all of life's nuances, from the depths of despair to the highest peaks of human experience, emotion and achievement. It has now become legitimate for artists to want to create poetically rendered works of beauty, joy and inspiration. I am happy that we at the Art Renewal Center are playing a crucial role in helping this true expression of art to grow and flourish.

Permit me to share our vision of cultural transformation which ARC has helped set in motion, a transformation made possible along with our thousands of friends and associates who run ARC's Approved Ateliers and Academy schools, who enter the ARC Salon, Scholarship and related competitions, and who run realism oriented art galleries, organize museum exhibitions of ARC Living Artists and Living Masters, who collect and purchase great humanist works, and to all our supporters who are there with us committed to loving and adoring poetically crafted and emotionally charged masterpieces of classical and humanist realism. Thank you all for throwing your hats into the ring with us and for doing what you can to help end a century of Modernist indoctrination, helping us create a 21st Century art world that we can be proud to hand down to our children.

How does ARC envision its role in making this positive cultural change permenent?

Our strategy to establish institutions parallel to those dominated by the modernists has the virtue of leaving us with no need to depend on them for anything. While one might have expected this to be a slow going process, we have found that we are moving faster by far than anyone could have predicted 5 short years ago. We know from thousands of related experiences and stories reported to us over the last five years, that trying to change things from within the established system is a waste of time. We have discovered the hard way that "skill-challenged" faculty members at every college and university in the country stand in the way of allowing any Living Master or well trained artist to be hired to teach, and intentionally prevent any system of training that actually works from being employed. Due in part to the Internet, we have in these last few years gone from 14 tiny known atelier schools with a total of 110 students, to today in which there are 64 ARC Approved Atelier and Academy schools in the world with over 2,000 students in training. The student bodies are growing fast...with new schools opening every few months. We have also learned that most of the talented young people who want to go into the fine arts, have in mind classical realism when they want to learn how to draw, paint or sculpt. These students are soon disillusioned when such skills are ridiculed in "art schools" and "art departments" everywhere except in the 64 ARC Approved® schools. As a result, many of the potentially most talented art students in the past 80 years were negatively impacted and wound up choosing other fields of endeavor, while the students who had the "find-a-gimmick-to-make-a-mint" mentality were the ones graduating with degrees in art. ARC has thrown the bright light of truth on these institutions, and their degrees are being given the "third degree". Now finally, the truly talented are readily finding the best available instruction here through our resources at the Art Renewal Center website, and www.artrenewal.org has become the most popular of Internet art and museum websites, attracting over 500,000,000 hits per year from supporters around the world.

A progressive, trained, and rapidly developing alternate art world, resulting from preferences built on humanist themes, which is what people really want from art, will fill our future with great artistic achievements. A live ARC Salon, hopefully traveling from New York to Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, London, and other major capitols around the world, will show the public what realism can acheive in a contemporary world. We need to continue to develop a more formal structure of educators, scholars, art historians and experts, who will continue to write and approve publications, conferences, and eventually create a highly developed system of affiliated galleries, museums, collectors, foundations, and patrons. Movements of this scale don't just materialize overnight, but the human need and the needs of a civilized, advanced and sophisticated society to have "real" art with which to communicate and express ideas, beliefs, values, and what it means to be human, is the only way to ensure our growth to prominence and to ensure our success. For ARC's success is no less than representative of the success of humanity itself in achieving a civilization predicated on caring, empathy, and a sensitivity to our fellow man.

So I would like to extend my sincere congratulations to the winners of this year's competition and my thanks to those who entered and all those who helped administer the ARC Salon, for their participation in this fundamental change in the art world and the real world.